10th March 2021
Alongside South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and other SADC countries, Botswana is one of the worldâs most unequal countries in the world in terms of wealth and income. What is even more disturbing though is a new revelation that the extent of such inequality remains unknown. That is because available information on Botswanaâs income and wealth distribution is also among the scarcest in the world.
A Paris-based research project called the World Inequality Database has developed the Inequality Transparency Index (ITI) which tracks wealth and income inequality in selected countries around the world. Botswana is among those countries and in the ITI edition of 2020, is among countries that scored between 0.5 and 2 out of 20. That means that working from the highest end of the scale, 80 percent of information on Botswanaâs income and wealth distribution remains unknown and that the depth of this inequality could be much deeper than is commonly believed.